A few years ago a compensation committee I was serving on was deliberating about the use of stock options for the senior executive team. As it happened, Penn State’s Donald Hambrick had just published some revelatory research on how stock options affect a company’s risk behavior. When I asked our compensation consultant if he knew […]

Information moves the market—that’s understood. But how information moves through the market to eventually affect stock prices is less well understood. After analyzing more than 15 years’ worth of investment data, we’ve found one way that information gets around and improves investing performance: through alumni networks. We examined a vast data set of trading decisions […]

The world of the manager is complicated and confusing. Making sense of it requires not a knack for simplification but the ability to synthesize insights from different mind-sets into a comprehensible whole.

Too focused on “scientific” research, business schools are hiring professors with limited real-world experience and graduating students who are ill equipped to wrangle with complex, unquantifiable issues—in other words, the stuff of management.

The key to success in business is action. But in most companies, people are rewarded for talking—and the longer, louder, and more confusingly, the better. The good news is, there are five strategies that can help you avoid the trap.

In 1983, a blue-ribbon panel composed mostly of educators told the United States that its future was at risk. In the eight years since, most Americans have come to agree with them. If once the public schools could do no wrong, today it seems they can do little right. Even parents who praise their own […]

How effectively a manager will perform on the job cannot be predicted by the number of degrees he holds, the grades he receives in school, or the formal management education programs he attends. Academic achievement is not a valid yardstick to use in measuring managerial potential. Indeed, if academic achievement is equated with success in […]